Help with Gearing Upgrades!

I'm currently playing a Wiz and am stuck on what gear to upgrade next. I'm running a CM/WW Energy Twister build now, but have also tried Meteor (Star Pact and Meteor Shower)/CM builds. Unfortunately it doesn't seem like I can solo anything above MP2 (and MP2 is too slow and painful to be worthwhile).

Could it just be that Wizards are 'harder' to play than WW Barbs? I can literally snooze through MP3 at least on my barb without having to pay attention lol, and I spent less gold on him than on my Wiz.

Your cc seems a little low, it should be 45-50. I suggest to run a sns build which is a variant of the cmww build. You use shocking armor instead of energy armor and diamond shards instead of crystal skin. The sns build doubles the damage you do eventhough it doesn't show on paper. I have slightly better specs with more cc and I can run mp6 no problem.

Oh, I completely forgot to respond to this topic after my initial answer. Sorry about that.

With 19 APoC and 2.76 APS I don't think 44% CC is too low, but it's just a question of personal preference. I ran MP8+ ubers with similar stats and even slightly lower CC. Don't think survivability/CMWW basics are the problem here, but rather what you expect to get out of it. In order to push your char and your DPS, here's what I would do: get a Mempo, probably without CC unless you can afford the 120m+ insanity (no idea what the cost is on US though, but that's what you pay for a CC Mempo on EU). If you get the Mempo, you'll get more AR but also lose LoH and APoC. You can get the LoH back on your rare ring (you don't need the AR on that anymore) and the APoC from a new offhand (which is the expensive part). Otherwise, your gear is in good shape and you just need to snipe for good deals on the AH, for example a Nat ring with crit would be freaking awesome. And a new amulet with 1.07, with LoH then.

As someone who played both barb and wiz, I'll try to compare them (note that this is my subjective opinion):

The barb is a class that can handle low and mid MP levels quite easily (thanks to less gear-dependent WW spec). Other specs might work as well but obviously you need better gear to survive on high MP levels.

The wizard is not "worse", it's "different". There is the Archon build which basically works on MP0/1 with budget gear, but even with expensive gear Archon is difficult to maintain on high MPs. CMWW, on the other hand, works best if mobs are alive for quite some time, and therefore is most suitable for higher MP levels. Obviously "mobs being alive" and "farming like a WW barb" don't fit together. CMWW is not really the spec you want for efficient farming (you'll need about one new keyboard per month), the equivalent of WW barb would be Archon wiz. There are other builds, and I'm glad that you tried them out, but they need either specific gear (and no one is really sure what this is because 99% of wizards play Archon or CMWW) or you need to acknowledge that they're not really fast and not suitable for high MP.

Well, without an IAS Chantodo's Will or a pair of Inna's Temperance to go with a Mempo, you won't be able to pass the final unbuffed APS breakpoint. So at this point, you're better off just pumping some serious CC into your unbuffed stats (without follower and Pinpoint).

If you do want to hit the final APS breakpoint, I suggest getting a ~1.77 APS Chantodo's Will. Then all you need to do is add 2% IAS to your overall gear. It might gimp your DPS a bit if you don't get a high damage one, but you can cover that if—keyword is if—you getcan afford an APoC Chantodo's Force and swap out your Storm Crow for a Mempo (if you can't afford crit on it, then replace that affix with double int roll, armor or vitality). If you grab the Mempo, you can then replace Lacuni with some high int and EHP bracers with max crit (will be significantly cheaper than high-end CC Lacuni).

But first work on your crit chance. Try to bring it closer to 50% to go easy-mode while farming. Then if you do decide to do an overhaul on some of your gear choices... at the final APS breakpoint and high CC, nothing is going to move when you start spamming your skills. Seriously.

Your character's name is Sansa. She wasn't a wizard, she was a whiny little brat. I suggest a reroll with a better character name ;p

You know, I don't know the numbers, but switching to a Mempho and swapping your chantodo force out for apoc is going to be massively expensive. To maintain the avg dmg on your source you should expect to spend easily in the 100M range. The shoulders should be upgradable to 260 Int for less than 10M. You could get Int on your bracers too and maybe make up some cc if you have some money. You might be better off using slow time with the ias rune to make up the difference to 3.001 a/s and piling on some damage instead of ias. I guess it all comes down to what you're doing with this. I have no doubt in my mind your current setup should be more than adequate to key farm at mp5. If you're paragon/item farming you should be doing archon at mp0/1, it's far more effective.

Sorry for the random thought process here, i just wanted to get my 2 cents quick

You know, I don't know the numbers, but switching to a Mempho and swapping your chantodo force out for apoc is going to be massively expensive. To maintain the avg dmg on your source you should expect to spend easily in the 100M range [...]

I guess I had to adjust my expectations just a little. My WW barb was indeed able to clear MP3 way faster than my wizard, which is just a tad disappointing considering that I spent much less gold on him. Now that I know CM/WW works differently I don't feel nearly that bad

1) I get so much trouble with ranged mobs (such as those Heralds of Pestilence) and can actually die even at MP2 or MP3 - is this normal? I try to tele to those mobs when I see them but sometimes I get overwhelmed when tele isn't back off CD yet.

2) What should I be looking for to increase my DPS - Int, CC, or CD? I realize that my CC is pretty low, and will look into the Mempo/apoc Chanto offhand option. I'm also going to upgrade my shoulders to get more Int (that seems like the obvious thing), but which is the stat that will give me the best bang for the buck at this point?

It sure seems to me that upgrading any of my pieces now is going to be pretty expensive, so I'm looking to maximize what I get from my gold naturally.

Yeah, that's why I never liked Storm Crow. Do look into your second point (for shoulders, it's really easy; just get massive intelligence along with EHP-enhancing stats like resist, armor, vitality, life %). If you're going for "efficiency," you're going to have to do a little gear revamping. Try Loroese's DPS/EHP calculator to balance out your stats while maintaining your important stats like APoC and LOH.

Then double-check with D3up.com before/after making the upgrades and DiabloProgress afterwards to ensure your stats match up. I do all of these things before and after I juggle my gear. If something goes wrong, I have time to remedy it before I regret it later on.

P.S. I don't know why you're dying so much to the Heralds on MP2. You should be able to take a few hits with your decent resistance and overkill armor. Might want to pump up that base HP, though.

I guess I had to adjust my expectations just a little. My WW barb was indeed able to clear MP3 way faster than my wizard, which is just a tad disappointing considering that I spent much less gold on him. Now that I know CM/WW works differently I don't feel nearly that bad

1) I get so much trouble with ranged mobs (such as those Heralds of Pestilence) and can actually die even at MP2 or MP3 - is this normal? I try to tele to those mobs when I see them but sometimes I get overwhelmed when tele isn't back off CD yet.

2) What should I be looking for to increase my DPS - Int, CC, or CD? I realize that my CC is pretty low, and will look into the Mempo/apoc Chanto offhand option. I'm also going to upgrade my shoulders to get more Int (that seems like the obvious thing), but which is the stat that will give me the best bang for the buck at this point?

It sure seems to me that upgrading any of my pieces now is going to be pretty expensive, so I'm looking to maximize what I get from my gold naturally.

Thanks in advance again for everyone's help!

I personally really hate CMWW for Act 3 farming because of the large number of ranged mobs and how annoying they are. I'm thinking it might be easier to run A2 VotA for CMWW farming or just stick to keeps for A3, maybe with skycrown and/or Stonefort.

Otherwise, if you don't have teleport available, either run to them with DS on or spam some twisters real fast to get teleport back off CD so you can teleport to them. What I'd recommend is to try to keep teleport off CD between mobs, so don't use it to travel faster, use it to jump into the fray and as a survival tool against elites.

Also, I wouldn't worry about raising your dps right now but instead focus on your mitigation. Your resist seems decent but you can definetly use some more armor so that you can drop pinpoint barrier for SA. SA and Storm armor will practically double your effective dps which makes farming MUCH faster. 44% CC is a little low, but at 47% with scoundrel it's decent for soloing. Otherwise you can swap your SC for a crit one (4.5% crit ones start around 10 mil) and then you'll be good on crit for a while. I only have 50% with scoundrel and that's about as high as I've ever felt the need to go. Obviously higher crit is better but at some point the cost to raise CC gets pretty high compared to just raising DPS via CD.

I've pretty much overhauled like half of my gear, and ended up with less DPS (91k) but considerably more EHP (316k). The recommended EHP table says that I can probably do MP9, but it seems to take me FOREVER to kill anything - I suppose it's because my DPS is too low.

I guess I've swung a little too far in the opposite direction (towards mitigation and away from DPS). However it seems (again) that any DPS upgrades are super expensive (like APoC Chanto OH with decent +dmg, Blackthorne's neck with +int, etc). How do these wizards I read about get 150k-200k DPS?? That just sounds crazy to me, does every slot have to be filled with close-to-BIS gear to attain those stats?

What would a reasonable DPS be to aim for, to be able to solo MP10? My target is to be a complete bad-ass and solo the whole of act 4. That would be like 'completing the game' for me!

As a CMWW wiz, there's not really any DPS requirements, aside from against bosses that enrage like Ubers. With 90k dps I'd recommend keeping at around MP5-7 in terms of efficiency but overall you can probably clear all of MP10 with that DPS, it'll just take a while to kill things. As for the EHP, there's nothing wrong with having higher EHP than you really need for a given MP since it still makes it easier to run the lower MP. That just means you can mostly stand in Arcane sentries, desecrator, etc and you don't have to move much. With less EHP you might have to avoid more things.

About reaching 150-200k DPS as a CMWW: it's not easy, and there's not a lot of well geared CMWW wizards with over 200k. I regeared a bit and am sitting right around 150k with scoundrel, but I went with the zuni boots+black weapon + triumvirate route. The problem with that route is I'm practically limited to 2.5 APS breakpoint, and I'm only around 280k EHP, but I just wanted it to farm MP6-8 for loot and xp in 1.07, or at least see how the xp gains are. For me to reach the 2.73 APS breakpoint, I basically have to swap to chanto set and either use Lacuni prowlers (which kills my EHP) or APoC Chanto OH which kills the bank, and use a mempo helm. Either way I will likely lose a lot of dps in the switch, so I opted to go with what I have.

Like I said above, you can probably solo MP10 with your current dps but if you want to farm MP10, it's probably not very efficient at even 150-200k dps compared to MP8-9. Otherwise I'd say 200k dps using SNS build.

Yeah don't get mixed up with Archon set up builds. Those are the ones you see for 300+k DPS mainly due to the black weapon/trim and skills like spark flint, magic weapon, glass cannon, etc. Even top shelf CM/WW builds will top out at around 200k dps.